The Philosopher and the Wolf, Mark Rowlands
Pegasus Books, 2010
(This is a very long essay,over 2,000 words, and may contain “spoilers” even though the book is nonfiction.)
Any book that makes me think about the world, or re-evaluate my own assumptions, is a good book.
Mark Rowlands is a British professor of philosophy who teaches at the University of Miami. He is the author of books like Animals Like Us, The Philosopher at the End of the Universe, and Everything I Know I Learned From TV, Philosophy for the Unrepentant Couch Potato. He also has books titles like The New Science of Mind; From Extended Mind to Embodied Mind. I don’t even know what that title means.
The Philosopher and the Wolf tells us about the years he spent with an Alaskan wolf. Rowlands taught at the University of Alabama in the 1990s and while he was there he bought a wolf cub he named Brenin (“King” in Welsh). Rowland’s deep love and affection for Brenin comes through with every story about the canine, but the book is a bit of a hybrid, part memoir and part philosophical treatise.
Rowlands describes the scene where he meets the wolves and cubs in vivid, almost mystical terms, and admits that while he can still picture the yellow eyes of Sitka, Brenin’s mother, and the bear-like bundles of fur that were the cubs, he remembers nothing about the man to whom he paid $500. Rowlands presents this as his initiation into the clan of the wolf.
The book alternates between sections sharing adventures with the wolf and philosophical observations about wolves and humans. Rowlands has the ability to make complex technical philosophical concepts accessible. He talks about apes-primates, or more bluntly, us—and wolves, and how we evolved differently. Rowlands struggles to debunk the myth of what I’ll call “ape exceptionalism.” Apes—humans—aren’t smarter than wolves or more sophisticated than wolves, just smart and sophisticated differently. Apes, Rowlands contends, are animals who developed a type of social intelligence, a type of commitment to the group, that led to the development of deceit. Humans are the animals who can lie.
He backs up the deceit issue with some well-documented primate research. Although he does not contrast his findings with wolf research, he does provide a story about Brenin and a hijacked Hungry Man dinner to bolster his point that wolves just can’t lie. On another level, Rowlands supports his theory about humans as lying animals by blithely recounting the instances that he lied to people, mostly officials and landlords, by calling Brenin a Malamute or saying that he had “only one small dog.”
I don’t disagree with his assessment of primates as deceptive and political animals, but Rowlands then falls into the trap of “wolf exceptionalism.” Wolves are all that is good, pure and noble, and to close the loop, Rowlands is, in his mind anyway, an honorary wolf, a “wolfbrother” to Brenin.
Rowlands has honest warnings for people who might want to get a wolf or a wolf-dog, and sharp words for those who do choose one out of some romantic notion of reconnecting with the wild, and then cannot meet the animal’s needs and leave it chained up or caged up. He exempts himself from this group, and he should. Rowlands made huge adjustments in his life to accommodate Brenin. Fortunately for him, he was able to. A college teacher with even a full course load has more available time during the day than most working people, and the University of Alabama actually allowed Rowlands to bring Brenin into his classroom. He did have to put a line in his syllabus reading, “Please ignore the wolf.” It is hard to imagine the manager of the local CostCo letting a checker keep a 150 pound wolf up behind the register. Rowlands is privileged, a man with enough control of his own time, and later in his career, enough money, to shape his life around Brenin, a fact he does not acknowledge enough in the book.
*
Rowlands spends Chapter Four in a long exploration of human evil. Rowlands believes that humans developed morality to protect ourselves from our own capacity for evil. He believes that humans have a moral duty to protect those less powerful than ourselves. In addition to that moral duty, we have an epistemic duty to subject our beliefs and assumptions to rigorous scrutiny. He cites Hannah Arendt’s work “The Banality of Evil,” and discusses the lack of empathy as the starting point of many acts of evil. Rowlands then uses an example from the 1950s, the Solomon-Wynne experiments, where two Harvard psychology professors (actually there was a third) locked dogs into a “shutterbox” with a barrier between two sections of the box and then sent electricity through the bottom of the box. At first, the dog could leap the barrier to the side that wasn’t conducting electricity in order to avoid the shock, but then the humans began to raise the barrier until the dog could not escape. The purpose was to learn more about the “learned helplessness” model of depression in humans. This experiment, or variations of it, continued for several decades. Rowland denounces it with passion. “I agree with Arendt that evil is banal. But it is our unwillingness, rather than our inability, that makes it so. There was no general inability on the part of Solomon, Kanin or Wynne to examine their beliefs. They were just unwilling to do so. There was no inability on their part to protect those dogs from further torture. They were just unwilling to do so. (p 100)”
This brings Rowlands back to the apes—us—and the manufacture of powerlessness as the proof of human evil. “Just as true human goodness can manifest itself only in relation to those who have no power, so too is weakness—at least relative weakness—a necessary condition of human evil. And it is here, I think, that we find the fundamental failing of human beings. Humans are the animals who manufacture weakness. We take wolves and make them into dogs. We take buffalo and make them into cows. . . We make things weak so that we may use them (my emphasis). In this we are utterly unique in the animal kingdom. (p 103)”
This is why Rowlands is eager to define himself as a spiritual wolf. He is quick to excuse the cruelty and predation of wolves on the weak or the killing of their own cubs as an instinctual survival-based response. We apes, he thinks, are different. “Humans are the animals who engineer the possibility of their own evil. (102)”
The period of intense thought, outrage and introspection that helped Rowlands formulate this theory also provided the seed for Animals Like Us and led to his version of a “social contract” with other animals. Seeing this dynamic playing out in his own life, Rowlands made some changes, such as becoming a vegetarian. He tried to impose vegetarianism on his wolf brother as well. Are you baffled? I was. Wolves, unlike primates, are carnivores, not omnivores. Here is Rowlands, recognizing that animals deserve dignity and self-determination to the extent possible, believing that our convenience should not outweigh their pain and their lives, trying to force his wolf to be vegetarian. This was not a serious problem because Brenin would have none of it, and Rowlands compromised by feeding the wolf fish. Rowlands is able to explain his reasoning. Fish contains nothing harmful for wolves; a wolf in the wild will eat a fish, they’re just not adapted to catch them. The harvesting of a fish causes less pain than the slaughter of a cow, and Rowlands believes that a fish, overall, has a happier life than a cow. A cow’s life does not have to be sacrificed for the convenience of Rowlands, or Brenin. Still, this is a difficult paradox to get around, and not the only one in the book. Rowlands longs to be a wolf. In fact, he’s an ape with a pet. He is a moral ape and he is conscientious about the needs of his pet, but he is still an ape controlling another animal. Rowlands wrestles with this throughout the book, sometimes rationalizing it, sometimes acknowledging it. Clearly this was no blind spot for him. He saw the contradictions in his own life. He comes closest to resolving it when he speaks of Brenin as, literally, his brother. In many ways, Brenin is the wise older brother teaching Rowlands the way of the natural world. Brenin teaches Rowlands about strength, honesty and defiance. And in other ways, Brenin is the vulnerable little brother who must be protected, since he lives in the society of apes and not wolves.
*
Alongside the penetrating philosophical observations and the fascinating stories about Brenin, a sadder story emerges. I can’t help wondering what a person with the instinct of a novelist or a story-teller, rather than a philosopher, would have created if given this starting point: “A young philosophy teacher in a foreign country bonds with a wolf pup.” Rowlands is isolated from humans during most of this period, or at least the book reads that way. Is it accidental that almost no human characters are named? He talks about his “nation of two;” Brenin and him. He talks about how much he enjoys drinking. In Alabama, he at least plays rugby, and there is a social connection with other humans, even if it involves mostly partying and pulling Brenin out of fights with other canines. When he returns to Britain (leaving Brenin in a six-month quarantine, the single act he most regrets because it violated his social contract with the wolf) he begins to get downright scary. One night, when they are living in County Cork in Ireland, Brenin flushed a prowler in the garden. Brenin had the man down and Rowlands followed right after, kicking and cursing him. Rowlands says this incident made him think that he and Brenin were “a little too volatile.” He does not tell us how much he had been drinking that night, but during this time period it is clear his two main loves are Brenin and alcohol. His response to this insight is to move further away from people, and isolate himself more, with only canines for company.
This brings me to another curious gap in a book shelved in the Memoir section at the bookstore. There are no pictures in the book. There is a picture of a wolf on the cover, and one small picture inside. Rowlands breezily brushes this off by saying that he didn’t take many pictures during this period, but he owned a wolf. Did no one take pictures? There are, in fact, a couple more pictures of Rowlands with a large wolf-like canine on Rowlands’s website. Did something happen to the pictures, or did Rowland secretly worry that Brenin, weighed down by the mystical freight of The Wild, would look too ordinary, too much like a dog, if we saw him in human settings? This lacuna is frustrating and mysterious.
*
Rowland describes himself as a person with something lacking. Plainly, you don’t choose a field like philosophy if you want to work closely with people. Brenin filled something in him, something empty. When Brenin dies in France, Rowlands builds a cairn in the woods. He puts the rocks together randomly, but as he sits there drinking near the fire in the dark woods with his two surviving dogs, he sees the shape of a wolf’s head in the stones.
*
In the last third of the book Rowlands himself muses on the limitations and ultimate contradictions of the “social contract.” As an animal advocate, Rowlands wants us to reconsider our assumption that humans are somehow the center of the world and it is all here for our use; that the convenience of any human is de facto more important than the well-being or life of another creature. In The Philosopher and the Wolf, he offers Brenin as an ambassador of the wild. “Who will speak for the wolf?” he asks. “I will.”
Humans are the animals that try to get meaning out of experiences, and The Philosopher and the Wolf is a search for meaning. Rowlands writes on at least two occasions that the book is difficult for him. It is, ultimately, a long eulogy to a friend.
I have quoted sections that seem serious, and by doing that have cheated you out of the pleasure of Rowlands’s dry, understated humor. The sections where he describes the couch cushion game, his afternoon walks with his three dogs in France, and, early in the book, the Hungry Man dinner incident, are concrete, delightful and filled with wit. Rowlands was an ape with a pet; but he loved and respected that pet. He did right by his “wolf-brother” according to his own moral code, and he used the experience of his decade or more with this powerful animal to learn something, and to give the rest of us apes tools for making sense of the world. The book leaves me with questions and I am sometimes skeptical of Rowlands’s logic leaps, but it makes me think. It makes me consider the world differently. That is the mark of a good book.